If you want to do a viable human Mars mission or any mission outside of the Earth-Moon system, you need to work with electric propulsion. Sure thing, we could build a massive solar array for electric propulsion, but a 50MW in-space nuclear reactor is just way better, more efficient and just plain simpler.
With a 50MW reactor and advanced electric propulsion, we can do Mars missions with 250 mt in Earth orbit. It's massively beautiful. Not to mention we don't even need Hohmann orbits any more, we can do direct orbital maneuvers, shorting transits to inner planets massively.
The fuel rods pose little danger if virgin or nearly virgin (just a few startups to test the reactor). Launch is not a problem, the problem would be one of those spacecrafts losing control when flying back to earth.
Andrew Bailey
they'd park it in lunar orbit and transfer the crew through a station or something.
You would never “land an inner-solar spacecraft”. You fly orbit to orbit until the shit exceeds its lifecycle (30yr like the ISS).
Cooper Adams
But what if someone with a bazooka wants to shoot it?
Ryan Wood
Greatest pork barrel ever designed.
Noah Bell
they either miss or they hit
Christopher Gutierrez
That's a thermal engine bro, not an electric one.
As long as it hasn't been under reactor conditions for very long, Uranium and plutonium are hold-in-your-hand safe. Ocean water already contains literally billions of tons of naturally occurring Uranium salts anyway.
Leo Gomez
Can someone explain to me how they plan to get past the Van Allen Belts?
>Politics is downstream from culture. it may very well be, that Kerbal Space has some influence on that.
Brody Lopez
uh, go thru it lmao?
Camden Peterson
Give it viagra
Levi Baker
RTGs are already a thing. As well as incidents involving it.
Easton Allen
You know all of our current nuclear reactors use tons of water, right? That's literal tons, as in "thousands of pounds." The cost to send even a few gallons of water into space is astronomic, how do you plan to get enough water to run a nuclear reactor?
Leo Martinez
The nuclear thermal propulsion in the article has nothing to do with electric propulsion Nuclear thermal engines use a fuel like hydrogen heated by a nuclear reactor and expelled by a rocket nozzle, there is no electricity involved and we have had a working nuclear thermal engine in the 60s
Dominic Scott
uh, do it once and just reuse the water lmao?
Levi Rivera
just use a fast breeder. cooling it in space won't be the problem i guess.
Juan Bailey
user, study up on Timberwind and other nuclear engine designs. Thermocouples exist. Name a non-Soviet/Russian problem that has ever occurred with RTGs. They are one of the safest power sources ever derived.
Landon Taylor
What could go wrong?
Hunter Lee
It could blow up in the atmosphere and make most of Earth highly poisons for human life?
Nicholas Taylor
nice try shill but we already know 'space' isnt even fucking real
That's vastly more uranides than in a protective armored shell heading to orbit.
Jacob King
The problem is that it will not be a bomb instead the nuclear waste will be in the atmosphere for far longer.
Connor Gomez
Do you realize how armored the containers they use for RTGs are when heading to orbit? They literally fished one out of the ocean and reused it with no leaking.
